What is bandwidth? How does one waste it?
Bandwidth is the amount of information that can be moved over a cable. The transfer of information over the Internet is limited by the physical limitations of the cables the information is transmitted through; thus, a post to Usenet which, for example, merely quotes back the entire 300 lines of a previous post and adds “I agree” to the bottom takes up space in the cables which could better be used by other posts. If enough bandwidth is wasted, no other posts can get through, as the cables would already be transmitting their maximum amount of data. New technology in cable manufacture has made it a challenge to even come close to using up all the bandwidth in most areas, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to take up lots of space with frivolous posts. In fact, the ever-increasing number of posts to Usenet has resulted in some systems reducing the expiration times on posts to only a couple days; thus it is not all that difficult for an increase of “worthless” posts to push
